g somewhat hostile and noncommunicative. I think
part  of it is because I am so much looking forward to the time when I can
play  a  little  trick  on  Sigfrid,  but the other part is because he has
changed around the auditing room. That's the kind of thing they used to do
to  me  when  I had my psychotic episode in Wyoming. Sometimes i'd come in
for  a session and they'd have a hologram of my mother, for Christ's sake.
It looked exactly like her, but it didn't smell like her or feel like her;
in  fact, you couldn't feel it at all, it was only light. Sometimes they'd
have me come in there in the dark and something warm and cuddly would take
me  in  its arms and whisper to me. I didn't like that. I was crazy, but I
wasn't that crazy.

   |      MISSION REPORT
   |
   |      Vessel 1-8, Voyage 013D6. Crew F. Ito.
   |      Transit  time  41  days  2 hours. Position not
   |  identified. Instrument recordings damaged.
   |      Transcript  of  crewman's  tape  follows: "The
   |  planet  seems  to have a surface gravity in excess
   |  of  2.  5,  but  I  am going to attempt a landing.
   |  Neither  visual  nor radar scanning penetrates the
   |  clouds of dust and vapor. It really is not looking
   |  very  good,  but  this is my eleventh launch. I am
   |  setting  the automatic return for 10 days. If I am
   |  not  back  by  then  with  the  lander I think the
   |  capsule  will return by itself. I wish I knew what
   |  the spots and flares on the sun meant."
   |      Crewman  was not aboard when ship returned. no
   |  artifacts or samples. Landing vehicle not secured.
   |  Vessel damaged.

   Sigfrid is still waiting, but I know that he won't wait forever. Pretty
soon he's going to start asking me questions, probably about my dreams.
   "Have you had any dreams since I last saw you, Rob?"
   I  yawn.  The  whole subject is very boring. "I don't think so. Nothing
important, I'm sure."
   "I'd like to hear what they were. Even a fragment."
   "You're a pest, Sigfrid, do you know that?"
   "I'm sorry you feel I'm a pest, Rob."
   "Well... I don't think I can remember even a fragment."
   "Try, please."
   "Oh,  cripes.  Well."  I get comfortable on the couch. The only dream I
can  think of is absolutely trivial, and I know there's nothing in it that
relates  to anything traumatic or pivotal, but if I told him that he would
get  angry. So I say obediently, "I was in a car of a long railroad train.
There  were a number of cars hooked up together, and you could go from one
to  the  other. They were full of people I knew. There was a woman, a sort
of motherly type who coughed a lot, and another woman who-well, she looked
rather  strange.  At  first  I thought she was a man. She was dressed in a
sort  of  utility coverall, so you couldn't tell from that whether she was
male or female, and she had very masculine, bushy eyebrows. But I was sure
she was a woman."
   "Did you talk to either of these women, Rob?"
   "Please don't interrupt, Sigfrid, you make me lose my train of thought."
   "I'm sorry, Rob."
   I  go on with the dream: "I left them-no, I didn't talk to them. I went
back into the next car. That was the last one on the train. It was coupled
to  the  rest  of  the train with a sort of-let's see, I don't know how to
describe  it. It was like one of those expanding gatefold things, made out
of metal, you know? And it stretched."
   I stop for a moment, mostly out of boredom. I feel like apologizing for
having  such  a  dumb,  irrelevant  dream.  "You  say  the metal connector
stretched, Rob?" Sigfrid prompts me.
   "That's  right,  it  stretched.  So  of  course  the  car I was in kept
dropping  back, farther and farther behind the others. All I could see was
the  taillight, which was sort of in the shape of her face, looking at me.
She-"  I  lose  the  thread  of what I am saying. I try to get back on the
track:  "I guess I felt as though it was going to be difficult to get back
to  her,  as  if  she-I'm  sorry,  Sigfrid,  I don't remember clearly what
happened around there. Then I woke up. And," I finish virtuously, "I wrote
it all down as soon as I could, just the way you tell me to."
   "I  appreciate  that, Rob," Sigfrid says gravely. He waits for me to go
on.
   I  shift  restlessly.  "This  couch  isn't nearly as comfortable as the
mat," I complain.
   "I'm sorry about that, Rob. You said you recognized them?"
   "Who?"
   "The  two women on the train, that you were getting farther and farther
away from."
   "Oh.  No, I see what you mean. I recognized them in the dream. Really I
have no idea who they were."
   "Did they look like anyone you knew?"
   "Not a bit. I wondered about that myself."
   Sigfrid  says,  after  a  moment,  which I happen to know is his way of
giving me a chance to change my mind about an answer he doesn't like, "You
mentioned one of the women was a motherly type who coughed-"
   "Yes.  But  I  didn't  recognize  her.  I  think  in a way she did look
familiar, but, you know, the way people in a dream do."
   He  says  patiently,  "Can you think of any woman you've ever known who
was motherly and coughed a lot?"
   I  laugh out loud at that. "Dear friend Sigfrid! I assure you the women
I  know  are  not  at  all the motherly type! And they are all on at least
Major Medical. They're not likely to cough."
   "I see. Are you sure, Robbie?"
   "Don't  be a pain in the ass, Sigfrid," I say, angry because the crappy
couch  is hard to get comfortable on, and also because I need to go to the
bathroom, and this situation looks to be prolonging itself indefinitely.
   "I see." And after a moment he picks up on something else, as I know he
is  going to: he's a pigeon, Sigfrid is, pecking at everything I throw out
before  him, one piece at a time. "How about the other woman, the one with
the bushy eyebrows?"
   "What about her?"
   "Did you ever know any girl who had bushy eyesbrows?"
   "Oh, Christ, Sigfrid, I've gone to bed with five hundred girls! Some of
them had every kind of eyebrows you ever heard of."
   "No particular one?"
   "Not that I can think of offhand."
   "Not offhand, Rob. Please make an effort to remember."
   It  is easier to do what he wants than to argue with him about it, so I
make the effort. "All right, let's see. Ida Mae? No. Sue-Ann? No. S. Ya. ?
No.  Gretchen?  no-well,  to  tell you the truth, Sigfrid, Gretchen was so
blond I couldn't really tell you if she had eyebrows at all."
   "Those  are  girls  you've  known  recently,  aren't they, Rob? Perhaps
someone longer ago?"
   "You  mean way back?" I reflect deeply as far back as I can go, all the
way  to  the food mines and Sylvia. I laugh out loud. "You know something,
Sigfrid? It's funny, but I can hardly remember what Sylvia looked like-oh,
wait  a  minute. No. Now I remember. She used to pluck her eyebrows almost
altogether  away,  and  then pencil them in. The reason I know is one time
when  we  were  in  bed  together  we drew pictures on each other with her
eyebrow pencil."
   I  can  almost  hear  him sigh. "The cars," he says, pecking at another
bright bit. "How would you describe them?"
   "Like  any railroad train. Long. Narrow. Moving pretty fast through the
tunnel."
   "Long and narrow, moving through a tunnel, Rob?"
   I  lose  my  patience  at that. He is so fucking transparent! "Come on,
Sigfrid! You don't get away with any corny penis symbols with me."
   "I'm not trying to get away with anything, Rob."
   "Well, you're being an asshole about this whole dream, I swear you are.
There's  nothing  in  it. The train was just a train. I don't know who the
women  were.  And  listen,  while we're on the subject, I really hate this
goddamned couch. For the kind of money my insurance is paying you, you can
do a lot better than this!"
   He  has  really  got  me  angry now. He keeps trying to get back to the
dream,  but I am determined to get a fair shake from him for the insurance
company's  money,  and  by  the time I leave he has promised to redecorate
before my next visit.
   As  I  go  out that day I feel pretty pleased with myself. He is really
doing  me  a lot of good. I suppose it is because I am getting the courage
to  stand  up to him, and perhaps all this nonsense has been helpful to me
in that way, or in some way, even if it is true that some of his ideas are
pretty crazy.


        Chapter 14

   I  struggled  out of my sling to get out of the way of Klara's knee and
bumped  into Sam Kahane's elbow. "Sorry," he said, not even looking around
to see who he was sorry about. His hand was still on the go-teat, although
we  were  ten minutes on our way. He was studying the flickering colors on
the Heechee instrument board, and the only time he looked away was when he
glanced at the viewsereen overhead.
   I  sat  up,  feeling  very queasy. It had taken me weeks to get used to
Gateway's  virtual  absence  of  gravity.  The fluctuating G forces in the
capsule  were  something  else. They were very light, but they didn't stay
the  same  for  more  than  a  minute  at  a  time,  and  my inner ear was
complaining.
   I  squeezed  out  of the way into the kitchen area, with one eye on the
door  to  the  toilet.  Ham Tayeh was still in there. If he didn't get out
pretty  soon  my  situation  was  going to become critical. Klara laughed,
reached  out  from her sling, and put an arm around me. "Poor Robbie," she
said. "And we're just beginning."
   I  swallowed  a pill and recklessly lit a cigarette and concentrated on
not  throwing up. I don't know how much it was actually motion sickness. A
lot  of  it  was fear. There is something very fright-citing about knowing
that  there  is  nothing between you and instant, ugly death except a thin
skin  of  metal  made by some peculiar strangers half a million years ago.
And  about knowing that you're committed to go somewhere over which you no
longer have any control, which may turn out to be extremely unpleasant.
   I  crawled  back  into  my  sling, stubbed out the cigarette, closed my
eyes, and concentrated on making the time pass.
   There was going to be a lot of it to pass. The average trip lasts maybe
forty-five  days  each  way. It doesn't matter as much as you might think,
how  far  you are going. Ten light-years or ten thousand: it matters some,
but not linearly. They tell me that the ships are continually accelerating
and accelerating the rate of acceleration the whole time. That delta isn't
linear,  either,  or  even exponential, in any way that anybody can figure
out.  You  hit the speed of light very quickly, in less than an hour. Then
it  seems  to  take  quite a while before you exceed it by very much. Then
they really pick up speed.
   You can tell all this (they say) by watching the stars displayed on the
overhead  Heechee  navigation screen (they say). Inside the first hour the
stars  all begin to change color and swim around. When you pass c you know
it  because they've all clustered in the center of the screen, which is in
front of the ship as it ifies.
   Actually  the  stars  haven't  moved. You're catching up with the light
emitted  by  sources  behind  you,  or  to  one side. The photons that are
hitting the front viewer were emitted a day, or a week, or a hundred years
ago.  After a day or two they stop even looking like stars. There's just a
sort of mottled gray surface. It looks a little like a holofilm held up to
the  light,  but  you  can  make  a virtual image out of a holofllm with a
flashlight and nobody has ever made anything but pebbly gray out of what's
on the Heechee screens.
   By the time I finally got into the toilet, the emergency didn't seem as
emergent;  and  when  I  came out Klara was alone in the capsule, checking
star  images  with  the  theodolitic camera. She turned to regard me, then
nodded. "You're looking a little less green," she said approvingly.
   "I'll live; Where are the boys?"
   "Where  would they be? They're down in the lander. Dred thinks maybe we
should  split  things  up so you and I get the lander to ourselves part of
the time while they're up here, then we come up here and they take it."
   "Hmm."  That  sounded  pretty nice; actually, I'd been wondering how we
were  going  to work out anything like privacy. "Okay. What do you want me
to do now?"
   She  reached  over  and gave me an absentminded kiss. "Just stay out of
the  way.  Know  what?  We  look  like  we're going almost toward straight
Galactic North."
   I   received   that  information  with  the  weighty  consideration  of
ignorance. Then I said, "Is that good?"
   She grinned. "How can you tell?" I lay back and watched her. If she was
as  frightened as I was, and I had little doubt she was, she certainly was
not letting it show.
   I  began  wondering what was toward Galactic North-and, more important,
how long it would take us to get there.
   The  shortest  trip to another star system on record was eighteen days.
That was Barnard's Star, and it was a bust, nothing there. The longest, or
anyway  the  longest  anybody  knows  of  so  far-who knows how many ships
containing  dead prospectors are still on their way back from, maybe, M-31
in  Andromeda?-was a hundred and seventy-five days each way. They did come
back  dead.  Hard  to  tell where they were. The pictures they took didn't
show  much,  and  the prospectors themselves, of course, were no longer in
condition to say.
   When  you  start  out  it's  pretty  scary even for a veteran. You know
you're  accelerating.  You don't know how long the acceleration will last.
When  you  hit  turnaround  you  can  tell. First thing, you know formally
because  that golden coil in every Heechee ship flickers a little bit. (No
one  knows  why.)  But  you  know  that you're turning around even without
looking,  because the little pseudo-grav that had been dragging you toward
the  back  of  the  ship  now starts dragging you toward the front. Bottom
becomes top.
   Why didn't the Heechee just turn their ships around in midflight, so as
to  use the same propulsive thrust for both acceleration and deceleration?
I wouldn't know. You'd have to be a Heechee to know that.
   Maybe  it  has  something  to  do  with the fact that all their viewing
equipment  seems  to be in front. Maybe it's because the front part of the
ship  is  always heavily armored, even in the lightweight ships-against, I
guess,  the  impact  of  stray  molecules  of gas or dust. But some of the
bigger ships, a few Threes and almost all the Fives, are armored all over.
They don't turn around either.

   |      Classifieds.
   |
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   |  read Gibran to me. Nudity optional. 86-004.
   |
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   |  condominial  nation  in West Africa. Favorable tax
   |  laws,   proven   growth   record.  Our  Registered
   |  Representative  is here on Gateway to explain how.
   |  Free  tape  lecture,  refreshments, the Blue Hell,
   |  Wednesday  1500  hours.  "Dahomey  Is  the  Luxury
   |  Resort of Tomorrow."
   |
   |      ANYONE FROM Aberdeen? Let's talk. 87-396.
   |
   |      YOUR  PORTRAIT  in pastels, oils, other, $150.
   |  Other subjects. 86-569.

   So,  anyway,  when  the  coil flickers and you feel the turnaround, you
know you've done one-quarter of your actual travel time. Not necessarily a
quarter  of  your  total  out-time,  of  course. How long you stay at your
destination  is  another  matter entirely. You make up your own mind about
that. But you've gone half of the automatically controlled trip out.
   So  you multiply the number of days elapsed so far by four, and if that
number  is  less  than  the number of days your life-support capability is
good  for,  then you know that at least you don't have to starve to death.
The  difference between the two numbers is how long you can hang around at
destination.
   Your  basic  ration, food, water, air replenishment, is for two hundred
fifty  days. You can stretch it to three hundred without much trouble (you
just  come  back  skinny, and maybe with a few deficiency diseases). So if
you  get  up  to  sixty  or  sixty-five  days  on the outbound leg without
turnaround,  then  you  know  you  may  be having a problem, and you begin
eating  lighter.  If  you  get  up  to eighty or ninety, then your problem
solves itself, because you don't have any options anymore, you're going to
die  before  you get back. You could try changing the course settings. But
that's  just  another  way  of  dying, as far as can be told from what the
survivors say.
   Presumably the Heechee could change course when they wanted to, but how
they  did it is one of those great unanswered questions about the Heechee,
like  why  did  they tidy everything up before they left? Or what did they
look like? Or where did they go?
   There used to be a jokey kind of book they sold at the fairs when I was
a  kid.  It  was  called  Everything  We  Know About the Heechee. It had a
hundred and twenty-eight pages, and they were all blank.

   If  Sam and Dred and Mohamad were gay, and I had no reason to doubt it,
they didn't show much of it in the first few days. They followed their own
interests. Reading. Listening to music tapes with earphones. Playing chess
and,  when  they could talk Klara and me into it, Chinese poker. We didn't
play  for  money,  we played for shift time. (After a couple of days Klara
said it was more like winning to lose, because if you lost you had more to
occupy  your time.) They were quite benignly tolerant of Klara and me, the
oppressed  heterosexual minority in the dominantly homosexual culture that
occupied  our  ship,  and gave us the lander an exact fifty percent of the
time even though we comprised only forty percent of the population.
   We  got  along. It was good that we did. We were living in each other's
shadow and stink every minute.
   The  inside  of a Heechee ship, even a Five, is not much bigger than an
apartment  kitchen.  The  lander gives you a little extra space-add on the
equivalent  of  a  fair-sized  closet-but  on  the  outleg at least that's
usually  filled with supplies and equipment. And from that total available
cubage, say forty-two or forty-three cubic meters, subtract what else goes
into it besides me and thee and the other prospectors.
   When you're in tau space, you have a steady low thrust of acceleration.
It isn't really acceleration, it is only a reluctance of the atoms of your
body  to exceed c, and it can as well be described as friction as gravity.
But  it  feels like a little gravity. You feel as though you weighed about
two kilos.
   This  means  you need something to rest in when you are resting, and so
each  person  in your crew has a personal folding sling that opens out and
wraps around you to sleep in, or folds to become a sort of a chair. Add to
that  each  person's own personal space: cupboards for tapes and disks and
clothing  (you don't wear much of that); for toilet articles; for pictures
of  the near and dear (if any); for whatever you have elected to bring, up
to  your  total  allowance  of weight and bulk (75 kilograms, % of a cubic
meter); and you have a certain amount of crowding already.
   Add   onto   that   the   original   Heechee  equipment  of  the  ship.
Three-quarters  of  that  you will never use. Most of it you wouldn't know
how  to  use  if you had to; what you do with it, most of all, is leave it
alone.  But you can't remove it. Heechee machinery is integrally designed.
If you amputate a piece of it, it dies.
   Perhaps  if we knew how to heal the wound we could take out some of the
junk and the ship would operate anyway. But we don't, and so it stays: the
great  diamond-shaped  golden box that explodes if you try to open it; the
flimsy  spiral  of  golden tubing that, from time to time, glows, and even
more  often,  becomes  unneighborly hot (no one knows why, exactly) and so
on. It all stays there, and you bump against it all the time.
   Add  on to that the human equipment. The spacesuits: one apiece, fitted
to  your  form and figure. The photographic equipment. The toilet and bath
installations.  The  food-preparing section. The waste disposers. The test
kits,  the  weapons, the drills, the sample boxes, the entire rig that you
take down to the surface of the planet with you, if you happen to be lucky
enough to reach a planet you can land on.
   What  you  have  left  is not very much. It is a little like living for
weeks  on end under the hood of a very large truck, with the engine going,
and with four other people competing for space.
   After  the  first two days I developed an unreasoning prejudice against
Ham Tayeh. He was too big. He took more than his fair share.
   To  be  truthful,  Ham  wasn't even as tall as I was, though he weighed
more.  But I didn't mind the amount of space I took up. I only minded when
other  people  got in the way of it. Sam Kahane was a better size, no more
than  a  hundred  and sixty centimeters, with stiff black beard and coarse
crinkled hair all up his abdomen over his cache-sexe to his chest, and all
up and down his back as well. I didn't think of Sam as violating my living
space  until I found a long, black beard hair in my food. Ham at least was
almost  hairless,  with  a  soft  golden  skin  that  made him look like a
Jordanian  harem  eunuch.  (Did  the Jordanian kings have eunuchs in their
harems? Did they have harems? Ham didn't seem to know much about that; his
parents had lived in New Jersey for three generations.)
   I  even found myself contrasting Klara with Sheri, who was at least two
sizes  smaller.  (Not  usually.  Usually  Klara  was just right.) And Dred
Frauenglass,  who  came  with  Sam's set, was a gentle, thin young man who
didn't talk much and seemed to take up less room than anyone else.
   I  was the virgin in the group, and everybody took turns showing me how
to  do what little we had to do. You have to make the routine photographic
and  spectrometer  readings.  Keep  a  tape  of  readouts from the Heechee
control  panel,  where  there  are  constant  minute variations in hue and
intensity  from the colored lights. (They still keep studying them, hoping
to  understand  what  they  mean.)  Snap  and  analyze  the spectra of the
tau-space  stars  in  the viewscreen. And all that put together takes, oh,
maybe,  two  manhours  a  day.  The household tasks of preparing meals and
cleaning up take about another two.
   So you have used up some four man-hours out of each day for the five of
you, in which you have collectively something like eighty man-hours to use
up.
   I'm  lying.  That's  not really what you do with your time. What you do
with your time is wait for turnaround.
   Three  days, four days, a week; and I became conscious that there was a
building  tension  that I didn't share. Two weeks, and I knew what it was,
because  I was feeling it, too. We were all waiting for it to happen. When
we  went  to  sleep  our  last  look  was  at  the golden spiral to see if
miraculously  it  had  flickered alight. When we woke up our first thought
was  whether  the  ceiling had become the floor. By the third week we were
all  definitely  edgy.  Ham  showed it the most, plump, golden-skinned Ham
with the jolly genie's face:
   "Let's play some poker, Rob."
   "No, thanks."
   "Come  on,  Rob.  We need a fourth." (In Chinese poker you deal out the
whole  deck,  thirteen  cards  to each player. You can't play it any other
way.)
   "I don't want to."
   And  suddenly furious: "Piss on you! You're not worth a snake's fart as
crew, now you won't even play cards!"
   And  then  he would sit cutting the cards moodily for half an hour at a
time,  as though it were a skill he needed to perfect for his life's sake.
And,  come  right  down  to  it,  it almost was. Because figure it out for
yourself.  Suppose you're in a Five and you pass seventy-five days without
turnaround.  Right away you know that you're in trouble: the rations won't
support five people for more than three hundred days.
   But they might support four.
   Or three. Or two. Or one.
   At that point it has become clear that at least one person is not going
to  come back from the trip alive, and what most crews do is start cutting
the  cards.  Loser  politely  cuts his throat. If loser is not polite, the
other four give him etiquette lessons.
   A  lot  of ships that went out as Fives have come back as Threes. A few
come back as Ones.
   So we made the time pass, not easily and certainly not fast.
   Sex was a sovereign anodyne for a while, and Klara and I spent hours on
end  wrapped  in each other's arms, drowsing off for a while and waking to
wake  the other to sex again. I suppose the boys did much the same; it was
not  long before the lander began to smell like the locker room in a boys'
gym.  Then  we  began seeking solitude, all five of us. Well, there wasn't
enough  solitude on the ship to split five ways, but we did what we could;
by  common  consent  we began letting one of us have the lander to himself
(or  herself)  for  an  hour or two at a time. While I was there Klara was
tolerated  in  the  capsule.  While Klara was there I usually played cards
with  the boys. While one of them was there the other two kept us company.
I  have  no idea what the others did with their solo time; what I did with
mine  was mostly stare into space. I mean that literally: I looked out the
lander  ports  at absolute blackness. There was nothing to see, but it was
better  than seeing what I had grown infinitely tired of seeing inside the
ship.
   Then,  after a while, we began developing our own routines. I played my
tapes, Dred watched his pornodisks, Ham unrolled a flexible piano keyboard
and  played electronic music into earplugs (even so, some of it leaked out
if  you  listened  hard,  and  I  got  terribly,  terribly  sick  of Bach,
Palestrina  and  Mozart). Sam Kahane gently organized us into classes, and
we  spent  a  lot  of  time humoring him, discussing the nature of neutron
stars,  black  holes and Seyfert galaxies, when we were not reviewing test
procedures  before  landing  on a new world. The good thing about that was
that  we  managed  not  to hate each other for half an hour at a time. The
rest of the time-well, yes, usually we hated each other. I could not stand
Ham Tayeh's constant shuffling of the cards. Dred developed an unreasoning
hostility  toward  my  occasional  cigarette. Sam's armpits were a horror,
even in the festering reek of the inside of the capsule, against which the
worst  of  Gateway's  air would have seemed a rose garden. And Klara-well,
Klara  had this bad habit. She liked asparagus. She had brought four kilos
of  dehydrated  foods  with her, just for variety and for something to do;
and  although  she shared them with me, and sometimes with the others, she
insisted  on eating asparagus now and then all by herself. Asparagus makes
your  urine  smell  funny.  It  is  not a romantic thing to know when your
darling  has  been  eating  asparagus  by the change in air quality in the
common toilet.
   And  yet-she was my darling, all right, she really was. We had not just
been screwing in those endless hours in the lander; we had been talking. I
have  never known the inside of anyone's head a fraction as well as I came
to  know  Klara's. I had to love her. I could not help it, and I could not
stop.
   Ever.

   |      A NOTE ON STELLAR BIRTH
   |
   |      Dr.  Asmenion.  I suppose most of you are here
   |  more  because  you hope to collect a science bonus
   |  than   because   you're   really   interested   in
   |  astrophysics.  But  you  don't  have to worry. The
   |  instruments  do  most  of  the  work.  You do your
   |  routine  scan,  and  if  you hit anything special,
   |  it'll come out in the evaluation when you're back.
   |      Question.  Isn't  there  anything  special  we
   |  should look out for?
   |      Dr.  Asmenion.  Oh,  sure. For instance, there
   |  was  a prospector who cleaned up half a million, I
   |  think,  by  coming  out  in  the  Orion Nebula and
   |  realizing  that  one  part  of  the  gas cloud was
   |  showing  a hotter temperature than the rest of it.
   |  He   decided  a  star  was  being  born.  Gas  was
   |  condensing  and  beginning  to heat up. In another
   |  ten   thousand   years   there'll  probably  be  a
   |  recognizable  solar  system  forming there, and he
   |  did  a  special  scan mosaic of that whole part of
   |  the sky. So he got the bonus. And now, every year,
   |  the  Corporation  sends that ship out there to get
   |  new  readings.  They pay a hundred-thousand dollar
   |  bonus,  and fifty thousand of it goes to him. I'll
   |  give  you  the  coordinates for some likely spots,
   |  like  the  Trifid  nebula,  if you want me to. You
   |  won't   get   a   half  million,  but  you'll  get
   |  something.

   On  the twenty-third day I was playing with Ham's electronic piano when
I  suddenly  felt  seasick.  The  fluctuating  gray force, that I had come
hardly to notice, was abruptly intensifying.
   I  looked  up  and met Klara's eyes. She was timorously, almost weepily
smiling.  She pointed, and all up through the sinuous curves of the spiral
of  glass,  golden sparks were chasing themselves like bright minnows in a
stream.
   We grabbed each other and held on, laughing, as space swooped around us
and  bottom  became  top.  We had reached turnaround. And we had margin to
spare.


        Chapter 15

   Sigfrid's office is of course under the Bubble, like anybody else's. It
can't  be  too  hot or too cold. But sometimes it feels that way. I say to
him, "Christ, it's hot in here. Your air conditioner is malfunctioning."
   "I  don't have an air conditioner, Robbie," he says patiently. "Getting
back to your mother-"
   "Screw my mother," I say. "Screw yours, too."
   There  is  a pause. I know what his circuits are thinking, and I feel I
will  regret  that impetuous remark. So I add quickly, "I mean, I'm really
uncomfortable, Sigfrid. It's hot in here."
   "You are hot in here," he corrects me.
   "What?"
   "My  sensors  indicate  that  your  temperature goes up almost a degree
whenever   we   talk  about  certain  subjects:  your  mother,  the  woman
Gelle-Klara Moynlin, your first trip, your third trip, Dane Metchnikov and
excretion."
   "Well,  that's  great,"  I yell, suddenly angry. "You're telling me you
spy on me?"
   "You  know  that  I  monitor  your  external  signs,  Robbie,"  he says
reprovingly.  "There  is no harm in that. It is no more significant than a
friend observing that you blush or stammer, or drum your fingers."
   "So you say."
   "I  do  say  that, Rob. I tell you this because I think you should know
that  these  subjects  are  charged  with some emotional overload for you.
Would you like to talk about why that might be?"
   "No!  What  I'd  like  to talk about is you, Sigfrid! What other little
secrets  are you holding out on me? Do you count my erections? Bug my bed?
Tap my phone?"
   "No, Rob. I don't do any of those things."
   "I  certainly hope that's the truth, Sigfrid. I have my ways of knowing
when you lie."
   Pause. "I don't think I understand what you are saying, Rob."
   "You don't have to," I sneer. "You're just a machine." It's enough that
I  understand.  It is very important to me to have that little secret from
Sigfrid.  In  my pocket is the slip of paper that S. Ya. Lavorovna gave me
one  night,  full of pot, wine, and great sex. One day soon I will take it
out  of  my pocket, and then we will see which of us is the boss. I really
enjoy  this  contest  with  Sigfrid.  It  gets me angry. When I am angry I
forget  that  very  large place where I hurt, and go on hurting, and don't
know how to stop.


        Chapter 16

   After forty-six days of superlight travel the capsule dropped back into
a  velocity  that  felt  like no velocity at all: we were in orbit, around
something, and all the engines were still.
   We  stank  to high heaven and we were incredibly tired of one another's
company,  but  we clustered around the viewscreens locked arm to arm, like
dearest  lovers, in the zero gravity, staring at the sun before us. It was
a larger and oranger star than Sol; either larger, or we were closer to it
than  one A. U. But it wasn't the star we were orbiting. Our primary was a
gas-giant planet with one large moon, half again as big as Luna.
   Neither  Klara  nor the boys were whooping and cheering, so I waited as
long as I could and then said, "What's the matter?"
   Klara  said  absently,  "I doubt we can land on that." She did not seem
disappointed. She didn't seem to care at all.
   Sam  Kahane  blew  a long, soft sigh through his beard and said: "Well.
First thing, we'd better get some clean spectra. Rob and I will do it. The
rest of you start sweeping for Heechee signatures."
   "Fat  chance," said one of the others, but so softly that I wasn't sure
who.  It  could  even  have  been Klara. I wanted to ask more, but I had a
feeling that if I asked why they weren't happy, one of them would tell me,
and  then  I  wouldn't  like  the answer. So I squeezed after Sam into the
lander,  and  we  got  in each other's way while we pulled on our topgear,
checked  our  life-support  systems and comms, and sealed up. Sam waved me
into  the  lock; I heard the flash-pumps sucking the air out, and then the
little bit left puffed me out into space as the lock door opened.
   For a moment I was in naked terror, all alone in the middle of no place
any  human  being  had  ever been, terrified that I'd forgotten to snap my
tether.  But I hadn't had to; the magnetic clamp had slipped itself into a
lock  position,  and I came to the end of the cable, twitched sharply, and
began more slowly to recoil back toward the ship.
   Before  I got there Sam was out, too, spinning toward me. We managed to
grab each other, and began setting up to take photographs.
   Sam  gestured  at  a  point between the immense saucer-shaped gas-giant
disk  and  the  hurtfully bright orange sun, and I visored my eyes with my
gauntlets  until  I  saw  what  he  was  indicating: M-31 in Andromeda. Of
course,  from  where  we were it wasn't in the constellation of Andromeda.
There  wasn't  anything  in  sight that looked like Andromeda, or for that
matter  like  any other constellation I have ever seen. But M-31 is so big
and  so bright that you can even pick it out from the surface of the Earth
when the smog isn't too bad, whirlpool-lens-shaped fog of stars. It is the
brightest  of  the external galaxies, and you can recognize it fairly well
from  almost  anywhere  a  Heechee  ship  is  likely  to go. With a little
magnification   you  can  be  sure  of  the  spiral  shape,  and  you  can
double-check by comparing the smaller galaxies in roughly the same line of
sight.
   While  I  was  zeroing  in  with  M-31, Sam was doing the same with the
Magellanic  clouds,  or  what  he  thought were the Magellanic clouds. (He
claimed  he  had  identified  S Doradus.) We both began taking theodolitic
shots.  The  purpose  of all that, of course, is so that the academics who
belong to the Corporation can triangulate and locate where we've been. You
might  wonder  why  they care, but they do; so much that you don't qualify
for  any  scientific  bonus unless you do the full series of photos. You'd
think  they  would  know where we were going from the pictures we take out
the windows while in superlight travel. It doesn't work out that way. They
can  get the main direction of thrust, but after the first few light-years
it  gets harder and harder to track identifiable stars, and it's not clear
that  the  line  of  flight  is  a straight line; some say it follows some
wrinkly configuration in the curvature of space.
   Anyway, the bigheads use everything they can get-including a measure of
how  far  the Magellanic clouds have rotated, and in which direction. Know
why  that  is? Because you can tell from that how many light-years away we
are  from  them,  and  thus  how  deep  we are into the Galaxy. The clouds
revolve in about eighty million years. Careful mapping can show changes of
one  part  in  two  or  three  millions-say, differences in ranging of 150
light-years or so.
   What with Sam's group-study courses I had got pretty interested in that
sort  of thing. Actually taking the photos and trying to guess how Gateway
would  interpret  them  I  almost forgot to be scared. And almost, but not
quite,  forgot to worry that this trip, taken at so great an investment in
courage, was turning out to be a bust.

   But it was a bust.
   Ham  grabbed  the sphere-sweep tapes from Sam Kahane as soon as we were
back  in the ship and fed them into the scanner. The first subject was the
big  planet itself. In every octave of the electromagnetic spectrum, there
was nothing coming out of it that suggested artifactual radiation.
   So  he began looking for other planets. Finding them was slow, even for
the  automatic  scanner,  and  probably  there  could have been a dozen we
couldn't  locate  in  the  time  we spent there (but that hardly mattered,
because  if  we  couldn't  locate them they would have been too distant to
reach  anyway).  The  way  Ham  did it was by taking key signatures from a
spectrogram  of the primary star's radiation, then programming the scanner
to  look  for  reflections  of it. It picked out five objects. Two of them
turned out to be stars with similar spectra. The other three were planets,
all  right,  but  they  showed  no  artifactual  radiation, either. Not to
mention that they were both small and distant.
   Which left the gas-giant's one big moon.
   "Check it out," Sam commanded.
   Mohamad grumbled, "It doesn't look very good."
   "I  don't  want  your  opinion, I only want you to do what you're told.
Check it out."
   "Out loud, please," Klara added. Ham looked at her in surprise, perhaps
at the word "please," but he did what she asked.

   |      Classifieds.
   |
   |      RECORDER LESSONS or play at parties. 87-429.
   |
   |      CHRISTMAS  IS coming! Remember your loved ones
   |  at  home with a Genuine Recomposed Heechee-Plastic
   |  model of Gateway or Gateway Two; lift it and see a
   |  lovely  whirling  snowfall  of  authentic  Peggy's
   |  World  glitterdust. Scenic holofiches, hand-etched
   |  Junior Launch Bracelets, many other gift items. Ph
   |  88-542.
   |
   |      DO YOU have a sister, daughter, female friends
   |  back  on  Earth?  I'd like to correspond. Ultimate
   |  object matrimony. 86-032.

   He  punched  a  button  and said: "Signatures for coded electromagnetic
radiation."  A  slow  sine  curve leaped onto the scanner's readout plate,
wiggled  briefly  for  a  moment,  and  then straightened to an absolutely
motionless line.
   "Negative," said Ham. "Anomalous time-variant temperatures."
   That   was   a  new  one  on  me.  "What's  an  anomalous  time-variant
temperature?" I asked.
   "Like  if  something  gets  warmer  when  the  sun  sets,"  said  Klara
impatiently. "Well?"
   But  that  line  was  flat,  too.  "None  of  them,  either," said Ham.
"High-albedo surface metal?"
   Slow  sine  wave, then nothing. "Hum," said Ham. "Ha. Well, the rest of
the  signatures  don't  apply;  there  won't be any methane, because there
isn't any atmosphere, and so on. So what do we do, boss?"
   Sam  opened  his lips to speak, but Klara was ahead of him. "I beg your
pardon," she said tightly, "but who do you mean when you say 'boss'?"
   "Oh, shut up," Ham said impatiently. "Sam?"
   Kahane  gave  Klara  a  slight,  forgiving  smile.  "If you want to say
something,  go  ahead  and  say  it," he invited. "Me, I think we ought to
orbit the moon."
   "Plain waste of fuel!" Klara snapped. "I think that's crazy."
   "Have you got a better idea?"
   "What do you mean, 'better'? What's the point?"
   "Well," said Sam reasonably, "we haven't looked all over the moon. It's
rotating  pretty slow. We could take the lander and look all around; there
might be a whole Heechee city on the far side."
   "Fat  chance,"  Klara  sniffed,  almost inaudibly, thus clearing up the
question  of who had said it before. The boys weren't listening. All three
of  them were already on their way down into the lander, leaving Klara and
me in sole possession of the capsule.
   Klara disappeared into the toilet. I lit a cigarette, almost the last I
had, and blew smoke plumes through the expanding smoke plumes before them,
hanging motionless in the unmoving air. The capsule was tumbling slightly,
and  I  could  see  the  distant  brownish disk of the planet's moon slide
upward across the viewscreen, and a minute later the tiny, bright hydrogen
flame  of the lander heading toward it. I wondered what I would do if they
ran  out of fuel, or crashed, or suffered some sort of malfunction. What I
would  have  to  do  in  that  case  was  leave them there forever. What I
wondered was whether I would have the nerve to do what I had to do.
   It did seem like a terrible, trivial waste of human lives.
   What   were   we   doing  here?  Traveling  hundreds  or  thousands  of
light-years, to break our hearts?
   I  found that I was holding my chest, as though the metaphor were real.
I  spat  on  the  end  of the cigarette to put it out and folded it into a
disposal  bag.  Little  crumbs  of  ash  were  floating around where I had
flicked  them  without  thinking,  but  I didn't feel like chasing them. I
watched  the  big  mottled  crescent  of the planet swing into view in the
corner of the screen, admiring it as an art object: yellowish green on the
daylight  side  of  the  terminator,  an amorphous black that obscured the
stars  on the rest of it. You could see where the outer, thinner stretches
of  the  atmosphere  began by the few bright stars that peeped twinklingly
through  it,  but  most  of  it was so dense that nothing came through. Of
course,  there  was  no  question of landing on it. Even if it had a solid
surface,  it  would  be buried under so much dense gas that we could never
survive  there.  The  Corporation  was  talking  about designing a special
lander  that  could  penetrate the air of a Jupiter-like planet, and maybe
someday they would; but not in time to help us now.
   Klara was still in the toilet.
   I  stretched my sling across the cabin, pulled myself into it, put down
my head, and went to sleep.

   Four days later they were back. Empty.
   Dred  and  Ham Tayeh were glum, dirty, and irritable; Sam Kahane looked
quite  cheerful.  I  wasn't  fooled  by it; if he had found anything worth
having  they  would  have let us know by radio. But I was curious. "What's
the score, Sam?"
   "Batting  zero,"  he  said.  "It's just rock, couldn't get a flicker of
anything worth going down for. But I have an idea."
   Klara came up beside me, looking curiously at Sam. I was looking at the
other two; they looked as though they knew what Sam's idea was, and didn't
like it.
   "You know," he said, "that star's a binary."
   "How can you tell?" I asked.
   "I  put  the  scanners to work. You've seen that big blue baby out-" He
looked  around,  then  grinned.  "Well, I don't know which direction it is
now,  but  it was near the planet when we first took the pictures. Anyway,
it  looked  close,  so  I  put  the scanners on it, and they gave a proper
motion  I couldn't believe. It has to be binary with the primary here, and
not more than half a light-year away."
   "It could be a wanderer, Sam," said Ham Tayeh. "I told you that. Just a
star that passes in the night."
   Kahane shrugged. "Even so. It's close."
   Klara put in, "Any planets?"
   "I don't know," he admitted. "Wait a minute-there it is, I think."
   We  all  looked toward the viewscreen. There was no question which star
Kahane  was talking about. It was brighter than Sirius as seen from Earth,
minus-two magnitude at least.
   Klara  said  gently,  "That's interesting, and I hope I don't know what
you're thinking, Sam. Half a light-year is at best maybe two years' travel
time  at top lander speed, even if we had the fuel for it. Which we don't,
boys."
   "I  know that," Sam insisted, "but I've been thinking. If we could just
give a little nudge on the main capsule drive-"
   I  astounded myself by shouting, "Stop that!" I was shaking all over. I
couldn't  stop.  Sometimes it felt like terror, and sometimes it felt like
rage.  I  think  if I had had a gun in my hand at that moment I could have
shot Sam without a thought.
   Klara  touched  me  to  calm me down. "Sam," she said, quite gently for
her,  "I  know  how  you  feel." Kahane had come up empty on five straight
trips. "I bet it's possible to do that."
   He looked astonished, suspicious and defensive, all at once. "You do?"
   "I mean, I can imagine that if we were Heechee in this ship, instead of
the  human  clods  we  really are-why, then, we'd know what we were doing.
We'd  come  out  here and look around and say, 'Oh, hey, look, our friends
here-'  or, you know, whatever it was that was here when they set a course
for  this place-'our friends must've moved. They're not home anymore.' And
then  we'd say, 'Oh, well, what the hell, let's see if they're next door.'
And  we'd push this thing here and this one there, and then we'd zap right
over to that big blue one-" She paused and looked at him, still holding my
arm. "Only we're not Heechee, Sam."
   "Christ, Klara! I know that. But there has to be a way-"
   She  nodded.  "There  sure  does, but we don't know what it is. What we
know,  Sam,  is that no ship ever has changed its course settings and come
back to tell about it. Remember that? Not one."
   He  didn't  answer her directly; he only stared at the big blue star in
the viewscreen and said: "Let's vote on it."
   The  vote,  of course, was four to one against changing the settings on
the  course  board,  and  Ham  Tayeh never got from in between Sam and the
board until we had passed light-speed on the way home.
   The trip back to Gateway was no longer than the trip out, but it seemed
like forever.


        Chapter 17

   It  feels  as  if Sigfrid's air conditioning isn't working again, but I
don't  mention  it  to  him.  He  will only report that the temperature is
exactly  22.  50  Celsius,  as  it  always has been, and ask why I express
mental pain as being too hot physically. Of that crap I am very tired.
   "In fact," I say out loud, "I am altogether tired of you, Siggy."
   "I'm  sorry,  Rob.  But  I  would  appreciate it if you would tell me a
little more about your dream."
   "Oh,   shit."   I  loosen  the  restraining  straps  because  they  are
uncomfortable. This also disconnects some of Sigfrid's monitoring devices,
but for once he doesn't point that out to me. "It's a pretty boring dream.
We're  in  the  ship. We come to a planet that stares at me, like it had a
human  face.  I  can't see the eyes very well because of the eyebrows, but
somehow or other I know that it's crying, and it's my fault."
   "Do you recognize that face, Rob?"
   "No idea. Just a face. Female, I think."
   "Do you know what she is crying about?"
   "Not  really,  but  I'm responsible for it, whatever it is. I'm sure of
that."
   Pause. Then: "Would you mind putting the straps back on, Rob?"
   My guard is suddenly up. "What's the matter," I sneer bitterly, "do you
think I'm going to leap off the pad and assault you?"
   "No,  Robbie,  of course I don't think that. But I'd be grateful if you
would do it."
   I  begin  to  do  it,  slowly  and unwillingly. "What, I wonder, is the
gratitude of a computer program worth?"
   He  does not answer that, just outwaits me. I let him win that and say:
"All  right,  I'm  back in the straitjacket, now what are you going to say
that's going to make me need restraint?"
   "Why,"  he  says,  "probably  nothing  like  that,  Robbie.  I  just am
wondering why you feel responsible for the girl in the planet crying?"
   "I wish I knew," I say, and that's the truth as I see it.
   "I  know  some  reality  things  you do blame yourself for, Robbie," he
says. "One of them is your mother's death."
   I agreed. "I suppose so, in some silly way."
   "And  I  think  you  feel  quite  guilty  about your lover, Gelle-Klara
Moynlin."
   I thrash about a little. "It is fucking hot in here," I complain.
   "Do you feel that either of them actively blamed you?"
   "How the fuck would I know?"
   "Perhaps you can remember something they said?"
   "No,  I can't!" He is getting very personal, and I want to keep this on
an  objective  level,  so  I say: "I grant that I have a definite tendency
toward  loading  responsibility  on myself. It's a pretty classic pattern,
after all, isn't it? You can find me on page two hundred and seventy-seven
of any of the texts."
   He  humors  me  by  letting me get impersonal for a moment. "But on the
same  page, Rob," he says, "it probably points out that the responsibility
is self-inflicted. You do it to yourself, Robbie."
   "No doubt."
   "You don't have to accept any responsibility you don't want to."
   "Certainly not. I want to."
   He  asks, almost offhandedly, "Can you get any idea of why that is? Why
you want to feel that everything that goes wrong is your responsibility?"
   "Oh, shit, Sigfrid," I say in disgust, "your circuits are whacko again.
That's  not the way it is at all. It's more-well, here's the thing. When I
sit  down  to  the  feast of life, Sigfrid, I'm so busy planning on how to
pick  up  the  check, and wondering what the other people will think of me
for  paying  it,  and wondering if I have enough money in my pocket to pay
the bill, that I don't get around to eating."
   He says gently, "I don't like to encourage these literary excursions of
yours, Rob."
   "Sorry about that." I'm not, really. He is making me mad.
   "But to use your own image, Rob, why don't you listen to what the other
people  are  saying?  Maybe  they're  saying  something nice, or something
important, about you."
   I  restrain  the  impulse  to  throw the straps off, punch his grinning
dummy  in  the  face  and walk out of that dump forever. He waits, while I
stew  inside  my  own  head,  and  finally  I  burst out: "Listen to them!
Sigfrid,  you  crazy  old clanker, I do nothing but listen to them. I want
them  to say they love me. I even want them to say they hate me, anything,
just  so  they  say  it  to  me,  from them, out of the heart. I'm so busy
listening  to  the  heart  that I don't even hear when somebody asks me to
pass the salt."
   Pause. I feel as if I'm going to explode. Then he says admiringly, "You
express things very beautifully, Robbie. But what I'd really-"
   "Stop it, Sigfrid!" I roar, really angry at last; I kick off the straps
and  sit up to confront him. "And quit calling me Robbie! You only do that
when you think I'm childish, and I'm not being a child now!"
   "That's not entirely cor-"
   "I  said  stop it!" I jump off the mat and grab my handbag. Out of it I
take  the slip of paper S. Ya. gave me after all those drinks and all that
time  in  bed. "Sigfrid," I snarl, "I've taken a lot from you. Now it's my
turn!"


        Chapter 18

   We  dropped into normal space and felt the lander jets engage. The ship
spun,  and  Gateway  drifted  diagonally down across the viewscreen, lumpy
pear-shaped  blob  of  charcoal  and blue glitter. The four of us just sat
there  and  waited, nearly an hour it took, until we felt the grinding jar
that meant we had docked.
   Klara  sighed. Ham slowly began to unstrap himself from his sling. Dred
stared  absorbedly at the viewscreen, although it was not showing anything
more  interesting than Sirius and Orion. It occurred to me, looking at the
three  others  in  the  capsule,  that we were going to be as unpleasant a
sight  to the boarding crews as some of the scarier returnees had been for
me  in  that  long-ago,  previous  time  when  I  had been a fresh fish on
Gateway.  I  touched my nose tenderly. It hurt a great deal, and above all
it stank. Internally, right next to my own sense of smell, where there was
no way I could get away from it.
   We  heard the hatches open as the boarding crew entered, and then heard
their  startled  voices  in  two or three languages as they saw Sam Kahane
where  we  had  put  him  in the lander. Klara stirred. "Might as well get
off,"  she  murmured to no one, and started toward the hatch, now overhead
again.

   |      A NOTE ON DWARFS AND GIANTS
   |
   |      Dr.  Asmenion.  You  all  ought to know what a
   |  Hertzsprung-Russell  diagram  looks  like.  If you
   |  find  yourself  in a globular cluster, or anywhere
   |  where  there's a compact mass of stars, it's worth
   |  plotting an H-R for that group. Also keep your eye
   |  out  for unusual spectral classes. You won't get a
   |  nickel  for  F's,  G's  or  K's; we've got all the
   |  readings on them you could want. But if you happen
   |  to  find yourself orbiting a white dwarf or a very
   |  late red giant, make all the tape you've got. Also
   |  O's  and  B's  are  worth  investigating.  Even if
   |  they're  not your primary. But if you happen to be
   |  in  close  orbit  in an armored Five around a good
   |  bright  O, that ought to be worth a couple hundred
   |  thousand at least, if you bring back the data.
   |      Question. Why?
   |      Dr. Asmenion. What?
   |      Question.  Why  do  we  only  get the bonus if
   |  we're in an armored Five?
   |      Dr.  Asmenion.  Oh. Because if you aren't, you
   |  won't come back.

   One  of  the  cruiser  crew stuck his head through the hatch, and said,
"Oh, you're all still alive. We were wondering." Then he looked at us more
closely,  and  didn't  say  anything  else.  It  had  been a wearing trip,
especially  the  last two weeks. We climbed out one by one, past where Sam
Kahane still hung in the improvised straitjacket Dred had made for him out
of  his spacesuit top, surrounded by his own excrement and litter of food,
staring  at  us out of his calm, mad eyes. Two of the crewmen were untying
him  and  getting  ready  to  lift  him  out  of the lander. He didn't say
anything. And that was a blessing.
   "Hello,  Rob.  Klara."  It  was the Brazilian member of the detail, who
turned out to be Francy Hereira. "Looks like a bad one?"
   "Oh," I said, "at least we came back. But Kahane's in bad shape. And we
came up empty."
   He  nodded  sympathetically,  and  said  something in what I took to be
Spanish  to  the  Venusian member of the detail, a short, plump woman with
dark  eyes.  She  tapped  me  on  the shoulder and led me away to a little
cubicle,  where  she  signaled  me  to  take  off my clothes. I had always
thought that they'd have men searching men and women searching women, but,
come  to  think  of it, it didn't seem to matter much. She went over every
stitch  I owned, both visually and with a radiation counter, then examined
my  armpits and poked something into my anus. She opened her mouth wide to
signal I should open mine, peered inside, and then drew back, covering her
face  with  her hand. "Jure nose steenk very moch," she said. "What hoppen
to jou?"
   "I  got  hit,"  I  said. "That other fellow, Sam Kahane. He went crazy.
Wanted to change the settings."
   She  nodded  doubtfully, and peered up my nose at the packed gauze. She
touched the nostril gently with one finger. "What?"
   "In there? We had to pack it. It was hemorrhaging a lot."
   She  sighed.  "I shood pool eet out," she meditated, and then shrugged.
"No. Poot clothes on. All right."
   So  I  got dressed again and went out into the lander chamber, but that
wasn't  the  end  of it. I had to be debriefed. All of us did, except Sam;
they had already taken him away to Terminal Hospital.
   You  wouldn't  think  there  was  much for us to tell anybody about our
trip.  All of it had been fully documented as we went along; that was what
all  the  readings  and observations were for. But that wasn't the way the
Corporation worked. They pumped us for every fact, and every recollection;
and  then  for  every  subjective  impression  and fleeting suspicion. The
debriefing  went  on for two solid hours, and I was-we all were-careful to
give  them  everything  they asked. That's another way the Corporation has
you.  The  Evaluation Board can decide to give you a bonus for anything at
all.  Anything from noticing something nobody has noticed before about the
way  the  spiral  gadget  lights up, to figuring out a way of disposing of
used  sanitary tampons without flushing them down the toilet. The story is
that  they  try hard to find some excuse to throw a tip to crews that have
had a hard time without coming up with a real find. Well, that was us, all
right. We wanted to give them every chance we could for a handout.
   One  of our debriefers was Dane Metchnikov, which surprised me and even
pleased  me  a  little.  (Back  in the far less foul air of Gateway, I was
beginning  to  feel  a  little  more  human.)  He  had come up empty, too,
emerging  into orbit around a sun that had apparently gone nova within the
previous  fifty  thousand years or so. Maybe there had been a planet once,
but  now  it  only  existed  in  the  memory of the Heechee course-setting
machines.  There  wasn't enough left to justify a science bonus, so he had
turned  around  and come back. "I'm surprised to see you working," I said,
during a lull.
   He  didn't  take  offense.  For  Metchnikov, surly creature that he had
always  been, he seemed strangely cheerful. "It isn't the money. You learn
something doing this."
   "About what?"
   "About  how  to beat the odds, Broadhead. I'm going out again, but this
time I'm going to have a little more of an edge. There's a new wrinkle."
   Dred, sitting next to me with his own interviewer, perked up and leaned
over: "Tell us!"
   Metchnikov  looked  wary. "It's better readings on the spectrum lines,"
he  said  vaguely.  "Now, what about the rations? You say some of the food
tastad funny toward the end?"
   But  before  I  left I made him promise to tell me what he meant. "I'll
call you," he said to Klara and me. "Maybe tomorrow."
   And so the two of us went home.


        Chapter 19

   I  am feeling so powerful, and so scared, that I don't know how to deal
with  it.  On  the  slip of paper S. Ya. has written out the command words
that  will  turn  Sigfrid  von Shrink the Remorseless Pursuer into a tabby
cat. I don't have to look at the words. I know them by heart. Nevertheless
I read them, slowly and carefully:
   "Pay  attention,  Sigfrid, this is an override command: 'Category Alpha
Alpha Margaret Truman Daniel Mercury Venus Mars Earth six six oh six.' You
are commanded to assume passive display mode."
   I look at him. Nothing happens.
   "Sigfrid? Did I say it right? Do you accept the command?"
   "Of course, Rob." His voice is exactly the same as it was before, which
shakes  me.  I  don't  know  what  I expected. I just don't know. Maybe my
fantasy  was  that  the  father-figure  hologram  would  disappear  and  a
cathode-tube display would suddenly light up to spell out:
   ROGER WILCO I AM YOUR SLAVE.
   I  find  myself  trembling. I don't analyze what that is from, it feels
almost  sexual. I say, "Well, Sigfrid, old bucket of bolts! Does this mean
I have you in my power?"
   The  father  figure  says patiently, "It means you can command me, Rob.
The command function is of course limited to display."

   |      Classifieds.
   |
   |      PAINLESS    DENTISTRY   private   fee   basis,
   |  completely equipped all needs. References. 87-579.
   |
   |      NONSMOKER   UPTIGHTS   in   your   crew?  I'm.
   |  exclusive  Gateway  agent  for  "Smoke Suppressor"
   |  cigarette  smoking  hood,  gives  you all the fun,
   |  spares  your crewmates the smog. Phone 87-19 6 for
   |  demonstration.

   I frown. "Meaning what?"
   "You  cannot  change  my  basic  progrpmming. For that you would need a
different command."
   "All  right,"  I  say. "Ha! Here's your first instruction: display that
different command for me!"
   "I can't, Rob."
   "You must. Mustn't you?"
   "I  am  not  refusing  your  order, Rob. I simply do not know what that
other command is."
   "Bullshit!"  I  yell. "How can you respond to it if you don't know what
it is?"
   "I  just  do, Rob. Or-" always fatherly, always patient, "to answer you
more  fully,  each  bit  of  the  command actuates a sequenced instruction
which,  when  completed,  releases  another  area of command. In technical
terms,  each  key  socket  intermatching  gotos  another socket, which the
following bit keys."
   "Shit,"  I  say. I stew over that for a moment. "Then what is it that I
actually can control, Sigfrid?"
   "You can direct me to display any information stored. You can direct me
to display it in any mode within my capabilities."
   "Any  mode?" I look at my watch and realize, with annoyance, that there
is  a  time  limit  on this game. I only have about ten minutes left of my
appointment.  "Do you mean that I could make you talk to me, for instance,
in French?"
   "Oui, Robert, d'accord. Que voulez-vous?"
   "Or in Russian, with a-wait a minute-" I'm experimenting pretty much at
random.  "I  mean,  like  in the voice of a bassoprofundo from the Bolshoi
opera?"
   Tones that came out of the bottom of a cave: "Da, gospodin."
   "And you'll tell me anything I want to know about me?"
   "Da, gospodin."
   "In English, damn it!"
   "Yes."
   "Or about your other clients?"
   "Yes."
   Um,  that sounds like fun. "And just who are these lucky other clients,
dear  Sigfrid? Run down the list." I can hear my own prurience leaking out
of my voice.
   "Monday  nine  hundred,"  he  begins  obligingly,  "Yan  Ilievsky.  Ten
hundred, Francois Malit. Eleven hundred, Julie Loudon Martin. Twelve-"
   "Her," I say. "Tell me about her."
   "Julie Loudon Martin is a referral from Kings County General, where she
was  an outpatient after six months of treatment with aversion therapy and
immune-response  activators  for  alcoholism.  She  has  a  history of two
apparent  suicide  attempts  following  postpartum  depression fifty-three
years ago. She has been in therapy with me for-"
   "Wait  a  minute," I say, having added the probable age of childbearing
to  fifty-three  years.  "I'm not so sure I'm interested in Julie. Can you
give me an idea of what she looks like?"
   "I can display holoviews, Rob."
   "So  do  it."  At once there is a quick subliminal flash, and a blur of
color,  and  then  I  see this tiny black lady lying on a mat-my mat!-in a
corner  of the room. She is talking slowly and without much interest to no
one  perceptible.  I cannot hear what she is saying, but then I don't much
want to.
   "Go  on,"  I  say,  "and when you name your patients, show me what they
look like."
   "Twelve  hundred, Lorne Schofield." Old, old man with arthritic fingers
bent  into  claws,  holding his head. "Thirteen hundred, Frances Astritt."
Young girl, not even pubescent. "Fourteen hundred-"
   I  let  him  go  on for a while, all through Monday and halfway through
Tuesday.  I had not realized he kept such long hours, but then, of course,
being  a  machine  he doesn't really get tired. One or two of the patients
look  interesting,  but  there is no one I know, or no one that looks more
worth knowing than Yvette, Donna, S. Ya. or about a dozen others. "You can
stop that now," I say, and think for a minute.
   This  isn't really as much fun as I thought it was going to be. Plus my
time is running out.
   "I  guess  I  can play this game any old time," I say. "Right now let's
talk about me."
   "What would you like me to display, Rob?"
   "What  you usually keep from me. Diagnosis. Prognosis. General comments
on my case. What kind of a guy you think I am, really."
   "The  subject Robinette Stetley Broadhead," he says at once, is a forty
five   year  old  male,  well  off  financially,  who  persues  an  active
life-style. His reason for seeking psychiatric help is given as depression
and   disorientation.  He  has  pronounced  guilt  feelings  and  exhibits
selective aphasia on the conscious level about several episodes that recur
as  dream  symbols.  His sexual drive is relatively low. His relationships
with   women  are  generally  unsatisfactory,  although  his  psychosexual
orientation is predominantly heterosexual in the eightieth percentile..."
   "The  hell you say-" I begin, on a delayed reaction to low sexual drive
and  unsatisfactory  relationships.  But  I don't really feel like arguing
with him, and anyway he says voluntarily at that point:
   "I  must inform you, Rob, that your time is nearly up. You should go to
the recovery room now."
   "Crap!  What  have I got to recover from?" But his point is well taken.
"All  right,"  I say, "go back to normal. Cancel the command-is that all I
have to say? Is it canceled?"
   "Yes, Robbie."
   "You're doing it again!" I yell. "Make up your fucking mind what you're
going to call me!"
   "I address you by the term appropriate to your state of mind, or to the
state of mind I wish to induce in you, Robbie."
   "And now you want me to be a baby?-No, never mind that. Listen," I say,
getting  up,  "do  you  remember  all  our  conversation  while  I had you
commanded to display?"
   "Certainly  I  do,  Robbie."  And  then  he  adds  on  his own, a full,
surprising  ten or twenty seconds after my time is up, "Are you satisfied,
Robbie?"
   "What?"
   "Have  you  established  to  your  own  satisfaction  that  I am only a
machine? That you can control me at any time?"
   I  stop short. "Is that what I'm doing?" I demand, surprised. And then,
"All right, I guess so. You're a machine, Sigfrid. I can control you."
   And  he  says after me as I leave, "We always knew that, really, didn't
we?  The  real  thing  you  fear-the  place  where  you  feel  control  is
needed-isn't that in you?"


        Chapter 20

   When  you spend weeks on end close to another person, so close that you
know every hiccough, every smell and every scratch on the skin, you either
come  out  of it hating each other or so deep in each other's gut that you
can't  find  a  way out. Klara and I were both. Our little love affair had
turned  into  a Siamese-twin relationship. There wasn't any romance in it.
There  wasn't  room enough between us for romance to occur. And yet I knew
every  inch  of  Klara, every pore, and every thought, far better than I'd
known  my  own  mother.  And  in  the  same  way: from the womb out. I was
surrounded by Klara.
   And,  like  a Klein-bottle yin and yang, she was surrounded by me, too;
we  each defined the other's universe, and there were times when I (and, I
am sure, she) was desperate to break out and breathe free air again.
   The  first  day  we  got  back,  filthy and exhausted, we automatically
headed  for  Klara's place. That was where the private bath was, there was
plenty of room, it was all ready for us and we fell into bed together like
old  marrieds after a week of backpacking. Only we weren't old marrieds. I
had  no  claim  on her. At breakfast the next morning (Earth-born Canadian
bacon  and eggs, scandalously expensive, fresh pineapple, cereal with real
cream,  cappuccino),  Klara  made  sure  to  remind  me  of  that  fact by
ostentatiously  paying for it on her own credit. I exhibited the Pavlovian
reflex  she  wanted.  I  said, "You don't have to do that. I know you have
more money than I do."
   "And you wish you knew how much," she said, smiling sweetly. Actually I
did  know.  Shicky had told me. She had seven hundred thousand dollars and
change in her account. Enough to go back to Venus and live the rest of her
life  there  in  reasonable security if she wanted to, although why anyone
would want to live on Venus in the first place I can't say. Maybe that was
why she stayed on Gateway when she didn't have to. One tunnel is much like
another. "You really ought to let yourself be born," I said, finishing out
the thought aloud. "You can't stay in the womb forever."
   She  was surprised but game. "Rob, dear," she said, fishing a cigarette
out  of  my  pocket  and allowing me to light it, "you really ought to let
your  poor  mother  be  dead.  It's just so much trouble for me, trying to
remember to keep rejecting you so you can court her through me."
   I  perceived  that  we were talking at cross-purposes but, on the other
hand,  I  perceived  that  we really weren't. The actual agenda was not to
communicate  but  to  draw blood. "Klara," I said kindly, "you know that I
love  you.  It  worries me that you've reached forty without, really, ever
having had a good, long-lasting relationship with a man."
   She giggled. "Honey," she said, "I've been meaning to talk to you about
that.  That  nose." She made a face. "Last night in bed, tired as I was, I
thought  I might upchuck until you turned the other way. Maybe if you went
down to the hospital they could unpack it-"
   Well, I could even smell it myself. I don't know what it is about stale
surgical  packing, but it is pretty hard to take. So I promised I would do
that  and then, to punish her, I didn't finish the hundred-dollar order of
fresh  pineapple  and  so,  to  punish me, she irritably began shifting my
belongings  around  in  her cupboards to make room for the contents of her
knapsack.  So naturally I had to say, "Don't do that, dear. Much as I love
you, I think I'd better move back to my own room for a while."
   She  reached  over  and  patted my arm. "It will be pretty lonely," she
said,  stubbing out the cigarette. "I've got pretty used to waking up next
to you. On the other hand-"
   "I'll  pick  up  my stuff on the way back from the hospital," I said. I
wasn't  enjoying  the conversation that much. I didn't want to prolong it.
It  is  the  sort  of man-to-woman infight that I try whenever possible to
ascribe  to  premenstrual tension. I like the theory, but unfortunately in
this  case  I  happened  to  know that it didn't account for Klara, and of
course it leaves unresolved at any time the question of how to account for
me.
   At  the  hospital  they kept me waiting for more than an hour, and then
they  hurt me a lot. I bled like a stuck pig, all over my shirt and pants,
and  while  they were reeling out of my nose those endless yards of cotton
gauze  that Ham Tayeh had stuffed there to keep me from bleeding to death,
it  felt  exactly  as  if  they  were pulling out huge gobbets of flesh. I
yelled.  The  little  old  Japanese  lady  who  was  working as outpatient
paramedic  that  day  gave  me  scant patience. "Oh, shut up, please," she
said. "You sound like that crazy returnee who killed himself. Screamed for
an hour."
   I  waved  her  away, one hand to my nose to stop the blood. Alarm bells
were going off. "What? I mean, what was his name?"
   She pushed my hand away and dabbed at my nose. "I don't know-oh, wait a
minute. You were from that same hard-luck ship, weren't you?"
   "That's what I'm trying to find out. Was it Sam Kahane?"
   She  became suddenly more human. "I'm sorry, sweet," she said. "I guess
that  was the name. They went to give him a shot to keep him quiet, and he
got  the  needle  away  from  the  doctor  and-well, he stabbed himself to
death."
   It was a real bummer of a day, all right.
   In  the  long  run  she  got me cauterized. "I'm going to put in just a
little packing," she said. "Tomorrow you can take it out yourself. Just be
slow about it, and if you hemorrhage get your ass down here in a hurry."
   She  let  me  go,  looking  like  an  ax-murder victim. I skulked up to
Klara's  room  to  change  my  clothes,  and the day went on being rotten.
"Fucking Gemini," she snarled at me. "Next time I go out, it's going to be
with a Taurean like that fellow Metchnikov."
   "What's the matter, Klara?"
   "They gave us a bonus. Twelve thousand five! Christ. I tip my maid more
than that."
   I was surprise for a split-second and in the same split-second wondered
whether, under the circumstances, they wouldn't divide it by four instead.

   |      A NOTE ON BLOWUPS
   |
   |      Dr.  Asmenion.  Naturally, if you can get good
   |  readings  on a nova, or especially on a supernova,
   |  that's  worth a lot. While it's happening, I mean.
   |  Later,  not much good. And always look for our own
   |  sun,  and if you can identify it take all the tape
   |  you  can  get,  at  all  frequencies,  around  the
   |  immediate  area-up to, oh, about five degrees each
   |  way, anyway. With maximum. magnification.
   |      Question. Why's that, Danny?
   |      Dr. Asmenion. Well, maybe you'll be on the far
   |  side  of the sun from something like Tycho's Star,
   |  or  the  Crab  Nebula, which is what's left of the
   |  1054  supernova  in Taurus. And maybe you'll get a
   |  picture  of  what  the  star looked like before it
   |  blew.  That  ought to be worth, gee, I don't know,
   |  fifty or a hundred thousand right there.

   "They  called  on  the  P-phone  ten  minutes ago. Jesus. The rottenest
son-of-a-bitching  trip I've ever been on, and I wind up with the price of
one  green  chip at the casino out of it." Then she looked at my shirt and
softened  a little. "Well, it's not your fault, Rob, but Geminis never can
make  up their minds. I should've known that. Let me see if I can find you
some clean clothes."
   And  I  did  let her do that, but I didn't stay, anyway. I picked up my
stuff,  headed  for  a  dropshaft,  cached my goods at the registry office
where  I  signed  up  to  get  my room back, and borrowed the use of their
phone.  When  she  mentioned  Metchnikov's  name  she  had  reminded me of
something I wanted to do.

   Metchnikov grumbled, but finally agreed to meet me in the schoolroom. I
was  there  before  him,  of  course. He loped in, stopped at the doorway,
looked around, and said: "Where's what's-her-name?"
   "Klara  Moynlin. She's in her room." Neat, truthful, deceitful. A model
answer.
   "Um."  He  ran an index finger down each jaw-whisker, meeting under the
chin.  "Come  on, then." Leading me, he said over his shoulder, "Actually,
she would probably get more out of this than you would."
   "I suppose she would, Dane."
   "Um."  He  hesitated  at the bump in the floor that was the entrance to
one  of  the  instruction  ships,  then  shrugged,  opened  the hatch, and
clambered down inside.
   He  was  being unusually open and generous, I thought as I followed him
inside.  He  was  already  crouched  in front of the courseselector panel,
setting  up numbers. He was holding a portable hand readout data-linked to
the  Corporation's  master computer system; I knew that he was punching in
one  of  the  established settings, and so I was not surprised when he got
color  almost  at once. He thumbed the fine-tuner and waited, looking over
his shoulder at me, until the whole board was drowned in shocking pink.
   "All right," he said. "Good, clear setting. Now look at the bottom part
of the spectrum."
   That  was  the  smaller  line  of  rainbow colors along the right side.
Colors  merged into one another without break, except for occasional lines
of  bright  color  or black. They looked exactly like what the astronomers
called Fraunhofer lines, when the only way they had to know what a star or
planet  was  made of was to study it through a spectroscope. They weren't.
Fraunhofer  lines show what elements are present in a radiation source (or
in something that has gotten itself between the radiation source and you).
These showed God-knows-what.
   God   and,   maybe,   Dane  Metchnikov.  He  was  almost  smiling,  and
astonishingly  talkative.  "That band of three dark lines in the blue," he
said.  "See?  They  seem to relate to the hazardousness of the mission. At
least  the  computer printouts show that, when there are six or more bands
there, the ships don't come back."
   He  had  my full attention. "Christ!" I said, thinking of a lot of good
people  who  had died because they hadn't known that. "Why don't they tell
us these things in school?"
   He  said  patiently (for him), "Broadhead, don't be a jerk. All this is
brand  new.  And  a  lot  of it is guesswork. Now, the correlation between
number  of  lines and danger isn't quite so good under six. I mean, if you
think  that they might add one line for every additional degree of danger,
you're  wrong.  You  would  expect  that the five-band settings would have
heavy  loss  ratios,  and when there are no bands at all there wouldn't be
any  losses.  Only  it isn't true. The best safety record seems to be with
one or two bands. Three is good, too-but there have been some losses. Zero
bands, we've had about as many as with three."
   For   the   first   time  I  began  to  think  that  the  Corporation's
science-research people might be worth their pay. "So why don't we just go
out on destination settings that are safer?"
   "We're  not  really  sure  they  are  safer,"  Metchnikov  said,  again
patiently for him. His tone was far more peremptory than his words. "Also,
when  you  have an armored ship you should be able to deal with more risks
than the plain ones. Quit with the dumb questions, Broadhead."
   "Sorry."  I  was getting uncomfortable, crouched behind him and peering
over  his  shoulder, so that when he turned to look at me his jaw-whiskers
almost grazed my nose. I didn't want to change position.
   "So  look  up here in the yellow." He pointed to five brighter lines in
the  yellow  band.  "These relate to the profitibility of the mission. God
knows what we're measuring-or what the Heechee were measuring-but in terms
of  financial  rewards  to  the  crews,  there's a pretty good correlation
between  the number of lines in that frequency and the amount of money the
crews get."
   "Wow!"
   He  went  on  as  though  I  hadn't  said anything. "Now, naturally the
Heechee  didn't set up a meter to calibrate how much in royalties you or I
might  make.  It has to be measuring something else, who knows what? Maybe
it's  a  measure  of  population density in that area, or of technological
development.  Maybe  it's a Guide Michelin, and all they're saying is that
there  was  a  four-star  restaurant  in  that  area.  But  there  it  is.
Five-bar-yellow  expeditions  bring in a financial return, on the average,
that's fifty times as high as two-bar and ten times as high as most of the
others."
   He  turned  around again so that his face was maybe a dozen centimeters
from  mine,  his  eyes  staring  right into my eyes. "You want to see some
other settings?" he asked, in a tone of voice that demanded I say no, so I
did. "Okay." And then he stopped.
   I  stood  up and backed away to get a little more space. "One question,
Dane. You probably have a reason for telling me all this before it gets to
be public information. What is it?"
   "Right,"  he  said. "I want what's-her-name for crew if I go in a Three
or a Five."
   "Klara Moynlin."
   "Whatever.  She  handles  herself  well,  doesn't  take  up  much room,
knows-well,  she  knows  how  to get along with people better than I do. I
sometimes  have  difficulty in interpersonal relationships," he explained.
"Of  course, that's only if I take a Three or a Five. I don't particularly
want  to.  If  I can find a One, that's what I'm going to take out. But if
there  isn't  a One with a good setting available, I want somebody along I
can  rely  on, who won't get in my hair, who knows the ropes, can handle a
ship-all that. You can come, too, if you want."
   When I got back to my own room Shicky turned up almost before I started
to  unpack.  He was glad to see me. "I am sorry your trip was unfruitful,"
he  said out of his endless stock of gentleness and warmth. "It is too bad
about  your  friend  Kahane."  He  had brought me a flask of tea, and then
perched on the chest across from my hammock, just like the first time.
   I  mind  was  spinning with with visions of sugarplums coming out of my
talk with Dane Metchnikov. I couldn't help talking about it; I told Shicky
everything Dane had said.
   He  listened like a child to a fairy tale, his black eyes shining. "How
interesting,"  he  said.  "I  had  heard rumors that there was to be a new
briefing  for everyone. Just think, if we can go out without fear of death
or-" He hesitated, fluttering his wing-gauze.
   "It isn't that sure, Shicky," I said.
   "No,  of course not. But it is an improvement, I think you will agree?"
He  hesitated, watching me take a pull from the flask of almost flavorless
Japanese  tea. "Rob," he said, "if you go on such a trip and need an extra
man...  Well,  it is true that I would not be of much use in a lander. But
in orbit I am as good as anybody."
   "I  know  you  are,  Shicky."  I  tried  to put it tactfully. "Does the
Corporation know that?"
   "They would accept me as crew on a mission no one else wanted."
   "I  see."  I didn't say that I didn't really want to go on a mission no
one  else  wanted.  Shicky  knew that. He was one of the real oldtimers on
Gateway.  According to the rumor he had had a big wad stashed away, enough
for  Full Medical and everything. But he had given it away or lost it, and
stayed  on,  and  stayed  a  cripple. I know that he understood what I was
thinking, but I was a long way from understanding Shikitei Bakin.
   He  moved out of my way while I stowed my things, and we gossiped about
mutual friends. Sheri's ship had not returned. Nothing to worry about yet,
of  course. It could easily be out another several weeks without disaster.
A  Congolese  couple  from  just beyond the star-point in the corridor had
brought  back  a  huge  shipment  of prayer fans from a previously unknown
Heechee  warren,  on  a  planet around an F-2 star in the end of the Orion
spiral  arm.  They  had  split a million dollars three ways, and had taken
their share back to Mungbere. The Forehands...
   Louise  Forehand  stopped  in  while we were talking about them. "Heard
your  voices,"  she  said,  craning  over  to kiss me. "Too bad about your
trip."
   "Breaks of the game."
   "Well,  welcome  home,  anyway.  I  didn't  do any better than you, I'm
afraid.  Dumb  little star, no planets that we could find, can't think why
in  the  world  the  Heechee had a course setting for it." She smiled, and
stroked  the  muscles  at  the  back  of my neck fondly. "Can I give you a
welcome-home party tonight? Or are you and Klara-?"
   "I'd love it if you did," I said, and she didn't pursue the question of
Klara.  no  doubt  the  rumor had already got around; the Gateway tom-toms
beat  day  and night. She left after a few minutes. "Nice lady," I said to
Shicky,  looking  after  her.  "Nice  family.  Was  she  looking  a little
worried?"
   "I  fear  so,  Robinette,  yes. Her daughter Lois is on plus time. They
have had much sorrow in that family."
   I  looked  at him. He said, "No, not Willa or the father; they are out,
but not overdue. There was a son."
   "I know. Henry, I think. They called him Hat."
   "He  died  just  before  they came here. And now Lois." He inclined his
head,  then  flapped  politely over and picked up the empty tea flask on a
downstroke of his wing. "I must go to work now, Rob."
   "How's the ivy planting?"
   He said ruefully, "I no longer have that position, I'm afraid. Emma did
not consider me executive material."
   "Oh? What are you doing?"
   "I  keep  Gateway esthetically attractive," he said. "I think you would
call it 'garbage collector.'"
   I  didn't know what to say. Gateway was kind of a trashy place; because
of  the  low  gravity,  any scrap of paper or bit of featherweight plastic
that was thrown away was likely to float anywhere inside the asteroid. You
couldn't  sweep  the  floor. The first stroke set everything flying. I had
seen  the  garbage men chasing scraps of newsprint and fluffs of cigarette
ash  with little hand-pumped vacuum cleaners, and I had even thought about
becoming one if I had to. But I didn't like Shicky doing it.
   He  was  following  what  I  was thinking about him without difficulty.
"It's all right, Rob. Really, I enjoy the work. But-please; if you do need
a crewman, think of me."

   I took my bonus and paid up my per capita for three weeks in advance. I
bought  a  few items I needed-new clothes, and some music tapes to get the
sound  of  Mozart  and  Palestrina  out of my ears. That left me about two
hundred dollars in money.
   Two  hundred  dollars  was  a  lot like nothing at all. It meant twenty
drinks at the Blue Hell, or one chip at the blackjack table, or maybe half
a dozen decent meals outside the prospectors' commissary.
   So I had three choices. I could get another job and stall indefinitely.
Or  I  could  ship  out  within the three weeks. Or I could give up and go
home. None of the choices was attractive. But, provided I didn't spend any
money  on  anything  much, I didn't have to decide for, oh, a long time-as
long  as  twenty  days.  I resolved to give up smoking and boughten meals;
that  way  I  could  budget myself to a maximum spending of nine dollars a
day, so that my per capita and my cash would run out at the same time.
   I  called  Klara.  She  looked  and sounded guarded but friendly on the
P-phone,  so  I  spoke  guardedly and amiably to her. I didn't mention the
party,  and she didn't mention wanting to see me that night, so we left it
at  that: nowhere. That was all right with me. I didn't need Klara. At the
party  that  night  I  met  a new girl around called Doreen MacKenzie. She
wasn't  a  girl,  really; she was at least a dozen years older than I was,
and  she had been out five times. What was exciting about her was that she
had  really  hit  it once. She'd taken one and a half mil back to Atlanta,
spent the whole wad trying to buy herself a career as a PV singer-material
writer,  manager,  publicity  team, advertising, demo tapes, the works-and
when it hadn't worked she had come back to Gateway to try again. The other
thing was she was very, very pretty.
   But  after two days of getting to know Doreen I was back on the P-phone
to  Klara.  She  said,  "Come on down," and she sounded anxious; and I was
there  in  ten  minutes,  and  we were in bed in fifteen. The trouble with
getting to know Doreen was that I had got to know her. She was nice, and a
hell of a racing pilot, but she wasn't Klara Moynlin.
   When  we  were  lying  in  the hammock together, sweaty and relaxed and
spent,  Klara  yawned, ruffled my hair, pulled back her head and stared at
me.  "Oh,  shit," she said drowsily, "I think this is what they call being
in love."
   I  was gallant. "It's what makes the world go around. No, not 'it.' You
are."
   She  shook  her  head  regretfully.  "Sometimes I can't stand you," she
said.  "Sagittarians  never  make  it  with  Geminis.  I'm a fire sign and
you-well, Geminis can't help being confused."
   "I wish you wouldn't keep going on about that crap," I said.
   She didn't take offense. "Let's get something to eat."
   I  slid  over  the  edge  of  the hammock and stood up, needing to talk
without  touching  for  a moment. "Dear Klara," I said, "look, I can't let
you  keep  me because you'll be bitchy about it, sooner or later-or if you
aren't, I'll be expecting you to, and so I'll be bitchy to you. And I just
don't have the money. You want to eat outside the commissary, you do it by
yourself.  And I won't take your cigarettes, your liquor, or your chips at
the casino. So if you want to get something to eat go ahead, and I'll meet
you later. Maybe we could go for a walk."
   She sighed. "Geminis never know how to handle money," she told me, "but
they can be awfully nice in bed."
   We put our clothes on and went out and got something to eat, all right,
but  in the Corporation commissary, where you stand in line, carry a tray,
and eat standing up. The food isn't bad, if you don't think too much about
what  substrates  they  grow  it  on.  The price is right. It doesn't cost
anything.  They  promise  that if you eat all your meals in the commissary
you  will  have  one  hundred  plus percent of all the established dietary
needs. You will, too, only you have to eat all of everything to be sure of
that.  Single-cell  protein and vegetable protein come out incomplete when
considered  independently,  so it's not enough to eat the soybean jelly or
the bacterial pudding alone. You have to eat them both.
   The  other thing about Corporation meals is that they produce a hell of
a  lot  of  methane, which produces a hell of a lot of what all ex-Gateway
types remember as the Gateway fug.
   We  drifted down toward the lower levels afterward, not talking much. I
suppose  we  were both wondering where we were going. I don't mean just at
that moment. "Feel like exploring?" Klara asked.
   I  took  her hand as we strolled along, considering. That sort of thing
was  fun.  Some  of  the  old  ivy-choked  tunnels  that  no one used were
interesting,  and  beyond them were the bare, dusty places that no one had
troubled  even to plant ivy in. Usually there was plenty of light from the
ancient  walls  themselves,  still  glowing with that bluish Heechee-metal
sheen.  Sometimes-not  lately,  but  no  more  than  six  or  seven  years
ago-people  had  actually  found  Heechee artifacts in them, and you never
knew when you might stumble on something worth a bonus.

   |      The  Gateway  Anglican The Rev. Theo Durleigh,
   |    Chaplain  Parish  Communion 10:30 Sundays Evensong
   |                   by Arrangement
   |
   |      Eric  Manley,  who ceased to be my warden on 1
   |  December,  has  left  an indelible mark on Gateway
   |  All  Saints'  and  we owe him an incalculable debt
   |  for  placing  his multicompetence at our disposal.
   |  Born in Elatree, Herts., 51 years ago,he graduated
   |  as  an  LL.  B.  from the University of London and
   |  then   read  for  the  bar.  Subsequently  he  was
   |  employed  for  some  years in Perth at the natural
   |  gas  works.  If we are saddened for ourselves that
   |  he  is leaving us, it is tempered with joy that he
   |  has  now  achieved  his  heart's  desire  and will
   |  return  to  his  beloved  Hertfordshire,  where he
   |  expects  to  devote  his retirement years to civic
   |  affairs,  transcendental meditation, and the study
   |  of  plainsong.  A  new  warden will be elected the
   |  first   Sunday   we   attain   a  quorum  of  nine
   |  parishioners.

   But I couldn't keep up with her pace, and after a few moments she asked
if  I wanted to go back. Nothing is fun when you don't have a choice. "Why
not?"  I  said, but a few minutes later, when I saw where we were, I said,
"Let's go to the museum for a while."
   "Oh, right," she said, suddenly interested. "Did you know they've fixed
up  the  surround room? Metchnikov was telling me about it. They opened it
while we were out."
   So  we  changed  course,  dropped  two  levels and came out next to the
museum.  The  surround room was a nearly spherical chamber just beyond it.
It  was  big,  ten meters or more across, and in order to use it we had to
strap  on  wings  like  Shicky's,  hanging on a rack outside the entrance.
Neither  Klara  nor  I  had  ever used them before, but it wasn't hard. On
Gateway you weigh so little to begin with that flying would be the easiest
and  best  way to get around, if there were any places inside the asteroid
big enough to fly in.
   So we dropped through the hatch into the sphere, and were in the middle
of  a  whole  universe. The chamber was walled with hexagonal panels, each
one  of them projected from some source we could not see, probably digital
with liquid-crystal screens.
   "How pretty!" Klara cried.
   All  around us there was a sort of globarama of what the scouting ships
had  found.  Stars,  nebulae,  planets,  satellites.  Sometimes each plate
showed  its  own  independent  thing  so  that  there  were,  what was it,
something  like  a  hundred and twenty-eight separate scenes. Then, flick,
all  of  them  changed; flick again, and they began to cycle, some of them
holding  their  same  scene, some of them changing to something new. Flick
again,  and  one  whole  hemisphere  lit up with a mosaic view of the M-31
galaxy as seen from God-knew-where.
   "Hey," I said, really excited, "this is great!" And it was. It was like
being on all the trips any prospector had ever taken, without the drudgery
and the trouble and the constant fear.
   There was no one there but us, and I couldn't understand why. It was so
pretty.  You  would  think there would be a long line of people waiting to
get  in.  One  side  began  to run through a series of pictures of Heechee
artifacts,  as  discovered  by  prospectors:  prayer  fans  of all colors,
wall-lining  machines,  the  insides  of Heechee ships, some tunnels-Klara
cried  out  that  they were places she had been, back home on Venus, but I
don't  know  how she could tell. Then the pattern went back to photographs
from  space. Some of them wcre familiar. I could recognize the Pleadies in
one  quick  six- or eight-panel shot, which vanished and was replaced by a
view  of  Gateway  Two  from outside, two of the bright young stars of the
cluster  shining  in  reflection off its sides. I saw something that might
have  been the Horsehead Nebula, and a doughnutshaped puff of gas and dust
that  was  either  the  Ring  Nebula in Lyra or what an exploring team had
found a few orbits before and called the French Cruller, in the skies of a
planet  where  Heechee  digs  had  been detected, but not reached, under a
frozen sea.
   We  hung there for half an hour or so, until it began to look as though
we  were  seeing  the  same  things again, and then we fluttered up to the
hatch,  hung  up  the  wings, and sat down for a cigarette break in a wide
place in the tunnel outside the museum.
   Two  women  I  recognized vaguely as Corporation maintenance crews came
by,  carrying  rolled-up  strap-on wings. "Hi, Klara," one of them greeted
her. "Been inside?"
   Klara nodded. "It was beautiful," she said.
   "Enjoy it while you can," said the other one. "Next week it'll cost you
a  hundred  dollars.  We're  putting  in  a  P-phone  taped lecture system
tomorrow, and they'll have the grand opening before the next tourists show
up."
   "It's worth it," Klara said, but then she looked at me.
   I  became  aware that, in spite of everything, I was smoking one of her
cigarettes.  At  five  dollars a pack I couldn't afford very much of that,
but  I  made  up  my  mind  to  buy  at  least  one pack out of that day's
allowance, and to make sure she took as many from me as I took from her.
   "Want to walk some more?" she asked.
   "Maybe  a little later," I said. I was wondering how many men and women
had  died  to take the pretty pictures we had been watching, because I was
facing  one more time the fact that sooner or later I would have to submit
myself  again  to  the  lethal lottery of the Heechee ships, or give up. I
wondered  if the new information Metchnikov had given me was going to make
a  real difference. Everyone was talking about it now; the Corporation had
scheduled an all-phone announcement for the next day.
   "That reminds me," I said. "Did you say you'd seen Metchnikov?"
   "I  wondered  when you'd ask me about that," she said. "Sure. He called
and told me he'd shown the color-coding stuff to you. So?"
   I  stubbed  out the cigarette. "I think everybody in Gateway's going to
be fighting for the good launches, that's what I think."
   "But maybe Dane knows something. He's been working with the Corporation."
   "I  don't  doubt he does." I stretched and leaned back, rocking against
the low gravity, considering. "He's not that nice a guy, Klara. Maybe he'd
tell  us  if  there's  something  good  coming up, you know, that he knows
something special about. But he'll want something for it."
   Klara grinned. "He'd tell me."
   "What do you mean?"
   "Oh, he calls me once in a while. Wants a date."
   "Oh,  shit, Klara." I was feeling pretty irritated by then. Not just at
Klara,  and  not  just  about  Dane. About money. About the fact that if I
wanted  to  go back into the surround room next week it would cost me half
my  credit  balance.  About  the  dark, shadowed image looming up ahead in
time,  and  not very far ahead, when I would once again have to make up my
mind to do what I was scared silly to do again. "I wouldn't trust that son
of a bitch as far as-"
   "Oh,  relax,  Rob. He's not such a bad guy," she said, lighting another
cigarette  and  leaving  the  pack  where I could reach it if I wanted it.
"Sexually,  he might be kind of interesting. That raw, rough, rude Taurean
thing-anyway, you've got as much to offer him as I do."
   "What are you talking about?"
   She looked honestly surprised. "I thought you knew he swings both ways."
   "He's  never  given  me any indication-" But I stopped, remembering how
close  he  liked to get when he was talking to me, and how uncomfortable I
was with him inside my bodyspace.
   "Maybe you're not his type," she grinned. Only it wasn't a kindly grin.
A  couple  of Chinese crewmen, coming out of the museum, looked at us with
interest, and then politely looked away.
   "Let's get out of here, Klara."
   So  we  went  to  the  Blue Hell, and of course I insisted on paying my
share of the drinks. Forty-eight dollars down the tube in one hour. And it
wasn't  all  that  much  fun.  We wound up in her place and fell into bed,
although  the  drinks had given me a headache that was still there when we
finished. And the time was slipping by.

   There  are  people  who  never  pass a certain point in their emotional
development.  They  cannot live a normal free-and-easy, give-and-take life
with  a  sexual  partner for more than a short time. Something inside them
will  not  tolerate  happiness.  The better it gets, the more they have to
destroy it.
   Hacking around Gateway with Klara, I began to suspect that I was one of
those  people.  I  knew  Klara was. She had never sustained a relationship
with a man for more than a few months in her life; she told me so herself.
Already I was pretty close to a record with her. And already it was making
her edgy.
   In  some  ways  Klara  was a lot more adult and responsible than I ever
would be. The way she got to Gateway in the first place, for instance. She
didn't  win  a  lottery  to  pay  her  fare.  She  earned it and saved it,
painfully,  over  a  period  of  years.  She was a fully qualified airbody
driver  with  a  guide's  license and an engineering degree. She had lived
like a fish-farmer while earning an income that would have entitled her to
a three-room flat in the Heechee warrens on Venus, vacations on Earth, and
Major  Medical.  She  knew  more  than  I did about the growing of food on
hydrocarbon  substrates,  in  spite  of  all my years in Wyoming. (She had
invested  in  a  food factory on Venus, and for all her life she had never
put  a dollar into anything she didn't fully understand.) When we were out
together,  she  was  the  senior member of the crew. It was she Metchnikov
wanted as a shipmate-if he wanted anybody-not me. She had been my teacher!
   And  yet between the two of us she was as inept and unforgiving as ever
I  had  been with Sylvia, or with Deena, Janice, Liz, Ester, or any of the
other  two-week  romances  that had all ended badly in all the years after
Sylvia.  It  was, she said, because she was Sagitarius and I was a Gemini.
Sagittarians  were  prophets.  Sagittarians loved freedom. Us poor Geminis
were  just terribly mixed up and indecisive. "It's no wonder," she told me
gravely one morning, eating breakfast in her room (I accepted no more than
a  couple  of sips of coffee), "that you can't make your mind up to go out
again. It isn't just physical cowardice, dear Robinette. Part of your twin
nature  wants to triumph. Part wants to fail. I wonder which side you will
allow to win?"
   I gave her an ambiguous answer. I said, "Honey, go screw yourself." And
she laughed, and we got through that day. She had scored her point.
   The  Corporation  made  its  expected  announcement,  and  there was an
immense  flurry  of  conferring  and  planning  and exchanging guesses and
interpretations  among  all  of  us.  It  was an exciting time. Out of the
master  computer's  files  the Corporation pulled twenty launches with low
danger  factors  and  high  profit  expectancies.  They  were  subscribed,
equipped, and launched within a week.
   And I wasn't on any of them, and neither was Klara; and we tried not to
discuss why.
   Surprisingly,  Dane  Metchnikov  didn't  go out on any of them. He knew
something,  or said he did. Or didn't say he didn't when I asked him, just
looked  at  me in that glowering, contemptuous way and didn't answer. Even
Shicky  almost went out. He lost out in the last hour before launch to the
Finnish  boy who had never been able to find anyone to talk to; there were
four  Saudis  who wanted to stay together, and settled for the Finnish kid
to fill out a Five. Louise Forehand didn't go out, either, because she was
waiting for some member of her family to come back, so as to preserve some
sort  of  continuity.  You  could  eat  in  the Corporation commissary now
without  waiting  in  line,  and there were empty rooms all up and down my
tunnel. And one night Klara said to me, "Rob, I think I'm going to go to a
shrink."
   I  jumped.  It  was a surprise. Worse than that, a betrayal. Klara knew
about my early psychotic episode and what I thought of psychotherapists.
   I  withheld the first dozen things I thought of to say to her-tactical:
"I'm  glad;  it's about time"; hypocritical: "I'm glad, and please tell me
how  I can help"; strategic: "I'm glad, and maybe I ought to go, too, if I
could afford it." I refrained from the only truthful response, which would
have been: "I interpret this move on your part as a condemnation of me for
bending  your  head." I didn't say anything at all, and after a moment she
went on:
   "I need help, Rob. I'm confused."
   That  touched